The first guy to entrust his life to a parachute was Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, who was interested in parachutes as a way to escape from buildings that had caught fire. He first leapt out of a tree with a couple of umbrellas to see if that would work. It worked well enough, I guess, because then he tried jumping from the Montpellier Observatory. A nineteenth-century postcard artist envisioned it looking very Mary Poppinsy:
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The earliest drawing of a parachute-like concept comes from Italy in the 1470s. Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola sketched the conical device you see below. It wouldn't have worked — the parachute is too small, the wood would be too heavy — but the idea is there:
About a decade later, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a similar idea — a pointy cloth parachute held open by a wooden frame. Though da Vinci’s design was never actually used in the Renaissance, it apparently works; a British skydiver named Adrian Nicholas tried it out in 2000.
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Boxing faded in popularity in the medieval era but resurfaced in Europe in the early modern period. By the early 1700s, England had a champion, James Figg, who was lionized in the streets of London. Figg, who both boxed and fought opponents with weapons like swords, won over 200 consecutive fights and opened a school to train prospective fighters. Here’s a trade card showing off his sword training:
I quite like this portrait of Figg — he doesn’t look unfriendly, exactly, but he gives off the air of a guy not to be messed with:
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More on boxing's revival here:
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Roman boxing was even crueler than Greek boxing. They invented the caestus, a boxing glove with a metal spike protruding from it:
This grimacing head of a boxer, who is missing several teeth, shows the toll the sport took on athletes.
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Ancient Greek boxing was a violent sport, with fighters' bare knuckles wrapped in a leather thong that cushioned their hands and allowed them to throw more punches. Referees carried long sticks, presumably to separate boxers, as shown on this amphora:
And this one gives a sense of the visceral nature of the combat, as one fighter’s nose spews blood:
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Much more on the history of ancient boxing:
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in Virgil's Aeneid, two fighters -- Dares and Entellus -- face off in a boxing match. Here’s a Roman-era mosaic from the floor of a French villa showing the two fighters, along with the bull that Entellus won and then sacrificed to the gods with a single blow to the skull:
A French artist tried to depict the scene in the 1500s, with much less fidelity to the original description (what’s up with those clubs?):
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The history of ancient boxing -- and its modern revival -- here:
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Guillaume Duchenne, a French neurologist, experimented in the middle of the nineteenth century with the electrical stimulation of facial muscles. He became convinced that he could replicate any human facial expression — which he believed directly connected to true emotions — by stimulating the right muscles.
Duchenne teamed up with the pioneering photographer Adrien Tournachon to create a catalog of expressions, generated on the faces of his unfortunate volunteers.
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More of Duchenne's photos here:
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As people mastered electricity, a small industry of electricity-cure quackery rose up in Europe; in this 18th-century cartoon, we see a rich British man receiving a “Galvanism” treatment; the result is that he has the energy to run across the street and hit on a “pretty girl.”
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More on the weird history of electrical experiments:
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Giovanni Aldini tried to prove that electricity could resurrect the dead by performing experiments on the corpse of George Forster, who was executed in 1803 for murdering his wife and child.
Immediately after Forster’s hanging, his body was brought to Aldini. In front of a crowd of dozens of people, Aldini applied electricity to Forster’s body, making his eye open and his limbs twitch as the crowd oohed and aahed. Some briefly believed that Forster had indeed been resurrected.
Though Aldini left this experiment — and others like it — disappointed because he had not brought the dead back to life, he had proven that electricity is an important force in the human body. Exaggerated stories of his experiments spread. Mary Shelley was clearly influenced by Aldini’s experiments when she wrote Frankenstein a decade later.
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More on the weird history of electrical experiments:
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The most famous early experiment with electricity was Ben Franklin’s kite. In 1752, he flew a kite with a metal key attached to his kite string in a thunderstorm. The key collected static electricity from the storm (it was not hit by lightning, as is commonly believed; that would have killed Franklin).
Sixty years later, Benjamin West depicted the moment as a moment of almost divine inspiration:
Though Franklin gets all the credit for this idea, a number of intrepid scientists were doing similar things around the same time — including Georg Wilhelm Richmann, who, the following year, was killed when lightning struck an apparatus he had set up.
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Many more experiments with electricity, from the silly to the sublime:
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Montmartre hosted a pretty raucous nightlife, centered around nightclubs like the Moulin Rouge, which opened in October 1889. The cabaret was the birthplace of the can-can, a high-kicking dance that was scandalous because it exposed what women were — or weren’t — wearing under their dresses. This is Georges Seurat’s depiction of it:
Jules Chéret and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec made the place famous with their exuberant posters advertising the venue’s shows. Here’s one of Chéret’s from 1889, showing dancers whose dresses leave little to the imagination:
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Much more on Montmartre -- including the famous dancer nicknamed "the Glutton" -- here:
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Montmartre had, in the early 1800s, been an agricultural town peripheral to Paris. You can see its sleepy rural nature in Georges Michel’s 1820 painting of “The Mill of Montmartre:”
But by the end of the 1800s, the neighborhood was a bustling, bohemian hub for artists like Degas, Renoir, or Toulouse-Lautrec. They hung out at cafes like this one, painted by Van Gogh:
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Much, much more on Paris during the Belle Epoque here:
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Like many world’s fairs, the 1889 expo tried to give attendees a taste of cultures around the world. One of the most popular attractions was the “Cairo Street,” where people could experience some of the sights, sounds, and tastes of Egypt:
It was an age of imperialism, which meant that France used the fair as an opportunity to trumpet its conquests. A pavilion represented each French colony, and visitors watched performances of “native cultures,” like this one representing French Indochina:
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Much, much more on the 1889 world's fair here:
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The biggest event in Paris — and maybe the whole world — in 1889 was the “Exposition Universelle,” a World’s Fair. The event attracted over 32 million visitors, a number approximating 2% of the world’s population (although this estimate is probably a little high, as many attendees came several times).
The big attraction of the fair was, as you can see in the poster above, the Eiffel Tower. The tower was the tallest structure in the world, dwarfing other famous sites like the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Statue of Liberty, as you can see in this design sketch from Eiffel’s firm:
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Much, much more on the 1889 world's fair here:
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There was a lot of propaganda during World War II encouraging soldiers to avoid venereal disease. Many of them revealed quite a bit about social attitudes in the 1940s:
More encouragement to avoid "prostitutes and pickups" here:
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I really enjoy these pages from an anti-malaria calendar issued to soldiers in World War II. It's a reminder that the soldiers were mostly just kids, and that the way to get them to pay attention was to make silly cartoons with pretty ladies in them.
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More propaganda at the link below:
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There was a surprising amount of anti-forest-fire propaganda during World War II:
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Why was the American government so worried about forest fires? And what did this have to do with Bambi and Smokey the Bear? Click below to find out:
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